Over a century before the principles of the “new evangelization” were proclaimed in 1965 in Gaudium et spes (The Pastoral Constitution on the Church and the Modem World) Catherine McAuley (1781-1841), vigorously promoted its two key principles: (1) the dignity of the human person and (2) the virtue of solidarity with the suffering poor, sick, and ignorant. From her First Conferences alter founding the Religious Sisters of Mercy in 1831 in Dublin, Ireland, Mother Catherine consistently taught her Sisters to put these principles into practice in their apostolic work in education and health care.

Drawing upon Venerable Catherine McAuley’s original writings and biographies of her life and works, this article will demonstrate how she helped prepare the way for consecrated persons in the new evangelization of the Church in the modem world. The themes are divided as follows: Part I—The Dignity of the Human Person, Part II—Solidarity with the Poor, Sick, and Ignorant, and Part III—Urgent Problems for the Church in the Modem World.

Had I been asked back in the 1950’s about the origins of ministry in the church, I should (being, in theological terms, a rather precocious teenager) have had a ready answer. The Lord had appointed apostles, answerable to Peter, who in turn had transmitted their authority to bishops, presbyters and deacons, all subject to Peter’s successors, the bishops of Rome. (If pressed, I might have acknowledged that it was possible that presbyters and bishops were originally indistinguishable, and that the threefold ministry may have developed from an earlier twofold ministry.) Had not Clement of Rome shortly before the end of the first century spoken of the line of successors running from Christ to the apostles and then to those that they in turn appointed (1 Clement 42; 44)? The inspired author of Acts had testified that it was the practice of Paul and Barnabas to appoint presbyters in every city (Acts 14:23), and Paul in the Pastoral letters had indicated that the means of designation was the laying-on of hands (1 Tim. 4:14, 5:22; 2 Tim. 1:6). The primacy of Peter was evident from Matt. 16:13-20; the intervention in the 90’s by Clement bishop of Rome in the affairs of the Corinthian church reflected the fact that Rome was already then exercising the primacy bestowed on Peter. A decade ago, Fr Aidan Nichols gave an account of the origins of ministry which has much in common with this one, but most of us now think that the way in which things came about was much more complex than that. Let us review the evidence in chronological order.

Elaine Scarry’s text The Body in Pain offers an analysis of the human experiences of suffering and pain as effects of divine and human making and remaking. Assuming a Feuerbachian analysis of the human projection of the divine, she maintains that God is the primal human Artefact who, once made, remakes the human subject in his own image through wounding and healing. That which distinguishes the human from the divine is embodiment. Embodied as they are, human beings can be wounded. God, being bodiless, cannot be wounded.

Scarry’s thesis relies overwhelmingly on a Western notion of human work that she believes has been passed into our culture through two dominant sets of religious and politico-economic discourses, for her those of Judeo-Christianity and of Marxism. These discourses have been so influential in the formation of western subjectivity that they reveal much, she holds, about the way Western subjects are constructed by discourses of pain and illness. It is this aspect of Scarry’s monumental work that interests me, and which I will initially use to read the text of the 13th century Flemish mystic Christina Mirabilis, before moving on to a consideration of her medieval contemporaries Hadewijch of Antwerp and Mechthild of Magdeburg. In reading Christina’s text, the problem I will pose is how her performance of wounding and healing assist in constructing/reconstructing herself as a mystical subject. Secondly I will ask the question, what theological and literary purpose does the language of wounding and healing serve in the medieval texts of the Beguines Hadewijch and Mechthild? In other words, what does the text produce?